ABSTRACT
In “Lacan’s Romanticism,” David Sigler places Sense & Sensibility next to The Prelude and Frankenstein. Sigler sketches Lacan’s Romanticism: his theories systematize a cultural transformation that began with Romantic literature. Romanticism was a fertile period for the development of modern psychoanalysis. For instance, Lacan discussed Wordsworth’s line, “the child is father of the man,” in relation to the Oedipus complex. Romantic-era writing appeared for Lacan as a correspondent to Freud’s thought and a privileged interlocutor. Romanticism paves the way to the Lacanian notion that jouissance never stops being written. Lacan’s return to Freud was also a return to Romanticism, a movement pioneering a way of theorizing jouissance at a period when the social link was turning itself inside-out. Romantic-era texts by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Keats exhibit jouissance at the heart of writing. A broader Romanticism linking Marquis de Sade and Surrealism foregrounds subversive jouissance, which makes us think differently about the implications of psychoanalytic literary studies.
